Mirroring

Chapter 1

The assembly hall is cooler than the classrooms were, but the plastic chair is still like having an iron pressed into my back. There is a crack in the backrest too, which keeps pinching my blue top, one of my favourites, so that I constantly have to shift position to free myself. It feels hotter than it was before the summer holidays, hot enough to be down on the beach again. This week, the weatherman said on my radio this morning, we are having one last burst of summer before autumn kicks in. I am part of a circle of students and we each hold a copy of the script for The Phantom of the Opera. I’m here on my own, although I recognise a few people, like Sarah and Becky from my ‘A’ level English class. It’s not surprising they’re here. Sarah is head of the charity committee and Becky is a librarian; apparently they can’t get enough of this place. Sarah says something to Becky that I don’t catch, and then flicks her head unnecessarily, seeing as her walnut-coloured hair sweeps obediently past her left eye and isn’t going anywhere. Becky throws her dainty fairy face back in a quiet laugh.

We are at the first drama club meeting of the new school year, and my first altogether. My mum suggested I go. She thought it might take my mind off things. ‘There’s more to life than boys, Kerry.’ I think of Russell now, with his messy hair that used to feel cool and clean between my fingers, and his T-shirts shouting the names of his favourite bands in capital letters. Russell buying me a doughnut on Brighton Pier, Russell holding my hand, Russell saying my brown eyes were like a dog’s, but in a good way. I play with the silver chain of my necklace, a gift I haven’t got around to putting away. The change of season might be good for me. Fewer associations. But that depresses me too.

Through the high windows on the other side of the hall I see a steady emptying of students, dodging cars also trying to leave from the school car park. There is an out-of-bounds road just before the exit, blocked by a heavy iron gate, which leads to the groundsman’s cottage. When I first came to St Francis, aged eleven, I found this road intriguing. A sharp bend and trees mean you don’t get any glimpse of the cottage itself and so in my imagination the road meandered off into some dense forest, with the cottage, like the one in Hansel and Gretel, sitting in a clearing in the centre. Eventually a group of us sneaked in at the weekend and climbed over the gate to find out once and for all what was around that bend. It was someone else’s idea, and I was scared to do it in case we got caught, but I had to know. The road finished abruptly with the rundown cottage, more like a bungalow, just a few metres from the bend. Behind it was a school building I now know to be the sixth form study room. A bit disappointing, really.

Mrs Burton, the drama teacher, pulls up a chair and perches on the edge of it, like she has some big secret to tell us. It turns out it’s just that The Phantom of the Opera is this year’s school play and auditions are next Wednesday. She looks like a witch, Mrs Burton, with her floaty black skirt and ankle boots. She’s fifty-something, I suppose. She hasn’t been one of my teachers since I was in year seven, when taking drama was compulsory. She looked exactly the same then. Today’s drama club, she says, will include singing practice with Mr Kensington. She will begin the session with a look at the story.

‘Does anyone know who wrote The Phantom of the Opera?’

‘I know,’ says a girl in uniform, probably in year ten or eleven. ‘Lloyd something.’

Mrs Burton mutters ‘Give me strength,’ and rolls her eyes. ‘I am talking about the book. Pay attention, you might learn something. The disfigured musical genius who terrorises the Paris Opera House was actually the creation of a French gothic novelist by the name of Gaston Leroux back in the early nineteen-hundreds.’

She continues like this for a while; reeling off details in a monotone. Finally she asks a question: ‘Don’t you people have anything to say?’ Time for a few chuckles only, and then Mrs Burton sighs and tells us to open our scripts, and we take it in turns to read the parts aloud until Mr Kensington comes.